More recent scholarship has questioned whether the chiefdom model adequately captures the complexity of Cahokia’s political organization.

Some archaeologists have proposed that Cahokia was governed by a more complex system — perhaps a corporate hierarchy in which political authority was shared among a council of elite lineages rather than concentrated in a single leader, or perhaps a system that combined centralized authority in some domains with more distributed authority in others.

The mortuary evidence — particularly the evidence from Mound 72 — has been central to this debate.

The beaded burial, with its extraordinary wealth of associated objects and the apparent evidence of sacrificial burials associated with it, suggests the existence of an individual of extraordinary power and authority — someone whose death was marked in ways that required the killing of other people.